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1024
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27 Jul 2014, 8:28 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:

Isn't the US "billion" the UK "milliard?" A "milliard," apparently, is 1,000 million

Therefore the UK "billion" would be the same as the German "billion."

According to Wikipedia UK uses the short scale too nowadays, though they used the long scale earlier.

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Kiprobalhato
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29 Jul 2014, 11:57 am

1024 wrote:

In Italian autista means driver.

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29 Jul 2014, 2:00 pm

Common abbreviations on the Internet: Portuguese bj (beijo, ?kiss?) and English bj (blowjob).

neobluex wrote:

Spanish from Spain= Coger (take/catch).
Spanish from Latin America= Coger (have sex).

I?ve found this here:

Quote:

For instance, the most common phrase meaning "grasp something" in Spain is "coger", which in Argentina is a colloquial and unellegant way of referring to having sexual interocurse (and yes, I could have replaced all that explanation with just the four letter word you all have in mind). A colloquial, not too elegant but also not too unellegant, expression used in Argentina is "joder", which means something along "having some fun", but in Spain means - guess what: yes, the four letter word again. So, when a Spaniard asks in Argentina where he can "coger" (take) a taxi, he is likely to receive some awkward answer like "Maybe through the tailpipe?" I recall a Spaniard (he would say a basque but that's another can of worms) who, during his first days in Argentina, told me (in Spanish): "All Argentinians have envy of me - I spend all day long 'cogiendo'"

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Kiriae
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29 Jul 2014, 2:40 pm

Czech "čerstvý" = fresh,
Polish "czerstwy" = stale, not fresh.
I find it funny to see "čerstvý chléb" at bakeries in Czech (CZ "chléb", PL"chleb" = EN "bread")

Polish "jeden" = one,
German "jeden" = each.
Imagine to mistake "one of them" vs "each of them". :lol:

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29 Jul 2014, 7:37 pm

Heh! Now, Czech and Polish remind me something ?

Romance languages generally have a word descended from Latin curva meaning?guess what??curve?: Spanish, Portuguese and Italian curva, French courbe, Catalan corba ? On the other hand, Slavic languages have an unrelated but near-homophonous word meaning ?whore?: Polish kurwa, Czech and Slovak kurva, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian and Macedonian курва (kúrva), Slovene kurba ?

This can be messy enough for a Romance-language speaker trying to buy a French curve from a female shopkeeper in a Slavic-speaking country. Of course, the most Slavicized Romance language, Romanian, has both curbă (?curve?), inherited from Latin, and curvă (?whore?), borrowed from neighboring Slavic languages. No problem as long as you learn which is what and your pronunciation clearly distinguishes b and v, right? Well, now imagine you?re a Spanish speaker used to pronouncing them the same ?

1024 wrote:

In Italian autista means driver.

Uhm ? now the name Grand Autismo, used by someone at some point on these forums, acquires a new dimension of meaning to me

trollcatman
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08 Aug 2014, 11:57 am

Dutch blazen: to blow (not sexual)
German blasen: blowjob

Dutch kok: cook
English cock: a male chicken

Kiprobalhato
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08 Aug 2014, 1:08 pm

Spiderpig wrote:

This can be messy enough for a Romance-language speaker trying to buy a French curve from a female shopkeeper in a Slavic-speaking country. Of course, the most Slavicized Romance language, Romanian, has both curbă (?curve?), inherited from Latin, and curvă (?whore?), borrowed from neighboring Slavic languages. No problem as long as you learn which is what and your pronunciation clearly distinguishes b and v, right? Well, now imagine you?re a Spanish speaker used to pronouncing them the same ?

yeah, i grew up surrounded by Spanish and 'b' and 'v' were for the most part the same sound, a bilabial fricative that doesn't exist in American English. however, i can swear that 'v' and 'b' were distinct when at the beginning of a word, i recognized a more, english-like 'v' when it was word-initial, most likely that's just my family's dialect however, and not representative of Spanish speakers as a whole.
this can create problems when typing/writing as sometimes it can he hard to tell what letters to use when the sounds are the same...i know for a fact it confuses my mom, who often types 'benir' and 'baca' instead of 'venir' and 'vaca' :lol:

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09 Aug 2014, 7:35 am

B and v were pronounced differently once upon a time in Spanish, but this distinction died out quite a few centuries ago. In fact, many previously phonetic spellings like cavallo and cantava¹ were changed to bring them into line with their Latin etymologies (caballo, cantaba), because one could no longer tell from pronunciation which letter to use. There was also a time when it was considered ?ugly? to spell two /b/ sounds with the same letter in a single word, which promoted forms like biven and bevida (modern viven and bebida, respectively).

Therefore, any modern ?revival? of the distinction according to current spellings doesn?t even match the historical one This hasn?t stopped some people now and then from doing it consciously, wanting to sound learnèd (but, depending on dialect, it can just sound weird and very affected), so their pronunciation?or traces of it?might have caught on in some places. It?s also understandable for something similar to happen under the influence of English (or French, or Portuguese, or Catalan ?), but, again, this doesn?t need to match current Spanish spellings: English govern and Basque vs Spanish gobernar and vasco, Portuguese livro vs Spanish libro, Catalan (and Occitan) trobador (whence French troubadour) vs Spanish trovador ?

_______________________________________

¹ In running text, the usual forms were actually cauallo and cantaua, just like English have and upon were spelled haue and vpon, respectively: u and v were still considered the same letter, and the choice between the two shapes was contextual, rather than phonetic. The only capital form was V.

LonelyJar
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15 Aug 2014, 3:12 am

Transliterated Hebrew - English cognate

baRECH - a knee
ahNEE - me
mee - who
huu - he
hee - she

KElev - dog
dahg - fish

Spiderpig
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28 Aug 2014, 9:57 pm

A piece of cutlery or silverware is a cubierto in Spanish. This word can also mean ?covered?, which is the only sense of its Portuguese cognate coberto.

Portuguese talher (?piece of cutlery, piece of silverware?) and Spanish taller (?workshop?).
Portuguese oficina (?workshop?) and Spanish oficina (?office?).
Portuguese escritório (?office?) and Spanish escritorio (?writing desk?).

A writing desk is an escrivaninha in Portuguese. This word can also be interpreted as meaning a little female registrar or clerk. The similarly constructed Spanish word escribanita would be understood only as ?little female scribe?.